Skills

A skill is a page of instructions Moe reads when a job looks like the one the page describes: how to work a spreadsheet, how to read a PDF, how to run a GitHub review, how to talk to Obsidian. Moe does not run a skill; it reads it, and then does what it says with the tools it already has. A fresh install comes with about a hundred of them.

Settings › Skills lists all of them, grouped by what they are for, Your Mac and your Apple apps, Documents and everyday work, Looking things up, Email, Writing code, and so on, with each skill's own one-line description underneath and a Switch off or Switch on button beside it. Four chips at the top narrow the list, each with its count: Everything, Can't run, Switched off and Moe has used. Refresh reads the list again.

The banner at the top is the reason the screen exists. Some skills say in their own text that they need a command installed, and nothing checks whether that command is actually on your Mac. So Moe finds out the way you would: it reads the page, runs the command, and is told there is no such thing, which costs you the answer you asked for. This page does the check nothing else does, says how many skills are in that state, and lists them first, each with Needs …, which isn't installed on this Mac. When nothing is in that state the banner says so: Everything switched on can actually run on this Mac.

Switching one off means Moe stops being offered it, here and on Moe Away, because the list of switched-off skills travels between them like everything else. Switching one on puts it back. Two kinds of row have no button and say why instead: one skill Moe needs to work at all, Always on, and any skill that is only ever offered inside a different kind of session, Not offered here.

Each row also says where the skill came from, Comes with Moe, Written for this Mac, Installed from a registry, and, if Moe has ever opened it, how many times and when. This page does not install, write or delete skills.

Sounding like you, not like a chatbot#

Ask Moe to make something sound like you, less like a chatbot, or more human, and it edits the text for the habits that give machine writing away: "it's not X, it's Y", a one-line closer that repeats the paragraph, "let's dive in", everything in threes, a dash in every sentence, bold labels down a list, "I hope this helps". What the text says stays exactly as it was: Moe adds no fact, name, number or quote it was not given, and if a sentence needs one, it asks. Give it a sample of your own writing first and it matches that instead.

This works on anything: a draft reply, an email Moe wrote for you, a note, a post, a file. It is a skill, so it shows up on this page as humanizer under Writing, can be switched off like any other, and needs nothing installed. Moe does not run it on every message it sends, only when you ask for it, or say that something reads as AI-written.